Are you doing what you love?

Strengths based development (and more recently recruitment) has been a personal passion and interest of mine for some time, so much so it’s running the risk of becoming my ‘wallpaper’ as I take for granted that not everybody uses or even understands this approach.  The sharp focus is back though, and so here comes my next post all about doing what you love.

There are bags of evidence out there about why people should use their strengths more in every aspect of their life – not just work, but home life too.  As a snap shot, it can boost someone’s confidence, give them higher levels of energy, make them more resilient or be more engaged with what they’re doing to name but a few outcomes.

My latest read on the strengths topic has come in the shape of ‘The Strengths Book’ from Capp.  I love the accessibility of the book and how it really shoots straight to the point about how to realise ‘the best of you’.  It explains the four quadrants of the model that is the heart of their approach – learned behaviours, weaknesses, realised strengths and unrealised strengths.  Learned behaviours being things that you perform well but you are de-energised or drained after doing them, weaknesses are then things that you perform poorly at and find de-energising or draining.  Your realised strengths are things which you perform well at find energising, and your unrealised strengths are things that you perform well at, find energising but don’t do very much. 

The book goes into detail about how to limit or make the most of each of the four aspects above as well as a breakdown of 60 strengths they use in their profiling, that I won’t go into, but I would thoroughly recommend giving the book a read – it’s so accessible and pragmatic as a tool but also as an on-going way of living.

So it leads me to one very simple question – are you spending time doing what you love? 

The answer might not be that simple for you, in fact I guess for most it could be a wakeup call so tread carefully with yourself – small changes could make the world of difference to you, this isn’t about having to drastically change your job overnight or what you spend your time doing, but there’s no time like the present to make positive changes to spend time doing things that make you happy.

Happy thinking x